New York church sells its airspace for £17.5m

While congregations elsewhere hold raffles, bake cakes and collect jumble to raise cash for repairs, members of a New York church have hit on another solution.

Worshippers at Christ Church on Park Avenue are to sell the air rights above their church to a property developer for more than $30 million (£17.5 million).

Under New York's arcane planning laws, acquiring the rights to the space above the church will allow the developer to build more storeys on a neighbouring exclusive apartment block with Central Park views.

A separate deal will allow residents of the apartments to use the church's coveted Park Avenue address.

The developer has also paid about $7 million to the 121-year-old Grolier Club, a society of academic bibliophiles whose low-rise town house contains a library of rare books.

The size and suddenness of the windfall has taken the congregation of upper east-side United Methodists by surprise. The 525 church members will vote today on whether to go ahead with the sale.

"This is a church with about 75 years of deferred maintenance," the Rev Stephen Bauman, the senior minister, said. "Some of the money will certainly go on repairs."

The church also has links with a charity in Harlem and another in Ghana that could also benefit. In a recent sermon Mr Bauman reassured his congregation that the deal was legal.

"If you didn't hear it from a minister standing in the pulpit, you might imagine this deal was akin to selling the Brooklyn Bridge," he said.

"But no, I assure you that this deal is bona fide, if just a bit peculiar to our specific location in New York City."

The homes market is so buoyant in mid-town Manhattan that the developer had to pay $430 per square foot for the church space, more than twice the going rate of $200.

"Location and timing have conspired to our very great favour, even unprecedented favour," said Mr Bauman.

"This news prompts myriad questions that compete for our attention; I'm not going to begin to answer them now," said Mr Bauman.

"There's a good chance they could overwhelm the regularly scheduled content. Like the final judgment, for instance."